The Top 136 Or So Albums Of The Nineties

An Introduction to this Learn’d Topick by Ned Raggett, Esq.

Elsewhere on this Site of Goodness, your kind host Tom Ewing is letting you
know about the top 100 singles of the decade in his estimation, which you should
be checking out first. So why this list, then?

Tom notes that some of the best songs of the decade never surfaced on an
album [quite true] and that "…album-based rock criticism has its own rhetoric,
mostly concerned about whether a record will last and where it stands in
relation to the established critical pantheon" [especially, and annoyingly,
true]. Hopefully I won’t be presenting that kind of chin-stroking canon-building
hoo-hah here, guilty as I can be of it sometimes [or all the time, for all I
know!], preferring just honest takes on the records that made me happy,
regardless of how important or not the world at large deemed them. Though in
fact, what I’d like to do here first is wax elegaic, because a summation of this
decade’s best albums makes excellent sense when albums as we know them are about
to be rendered obsolete in many ways.

What? Yes. When Tom alludes to ‘album-based rock criticism,’ he also slyly
notes that the medium is very much the message. The latter half of the twentieth
century is the window in which the vinyl/cassette/CD medium – three variants of
one basic mean – has come to flourish and dominate. Given that recorded music is
barely over a hundred years old, it has been fascinating to realize in how swift
a period of time the ‘listening experience’ has been codified, in certain ways,
as that of silent appreciation of an unchanging set of songs, which is what most
album listening involves. Needless to say, of course, it is not the only
way to listen to recorded music and never has been, thus radio, dancehalls, mix
tapes, live DJing events and so forth. But the method described is the dominant
one in terms of both sales and, therefore, attendant discourse. If, say, live
DJing was the backbone of the record industry, it would be the putative norm
criticism would react to. But it isn’t and here we are in the world of
Rolling Stone, Q, and The Wire, to mention three of many
particular album criticism models. Arguably Downbeat in the fifties
provided the template, as postwar jazz became the ‘serious’ musical moneydriver
in contrast to rock and roll’s claimed frivolousness, and therefore more
immediately deserving of deep thoughts regarding long-playing vinyl artifacts.
Since then, we have seen canonical [and anti-canonical approaches absorbed as
canonical] album criticism models flourish, capturing an unspoken musical
experience in words as best as possible.

But this is about to change probably for good, thanks to technology’s
apparently endless march. While the hype regarding mp3s and so forth has mostly
remained that during the latter part of the decade – from a strictly capitalist
point of view, the market is promising but still very small, and limited by
infrastructure and other technical issues – ten years will see this change
radically. Enough initial toes-dipped-in-water scenarios have occurred, wherein
increasingly bigger name acts have made songs available for free download to
entice album purchases and, far more importantly, for download of a song for
direct purchase independent of an album. While this is on the face of it little
more than an extension of the basic philosophy of vinyl [and CD, etc.] singles,
it’s not that hard to extend this situation wherein a musician can eschew formal
‘album’ releases in favor of simply uploading newer songs as they are recorded
to a central location. From there, purchasers can take what they want, make
their own mixes from an extensive back catalog, select some songs but not others
from the newest batch, and so forth. No doubt discussion and planning for such a
possible variety of approaches is going on right now, and will only accelerate.

All this will help to undermine, slowly or quickly, the current presumptions
about album releases as predetermined forms needing to always be adhered to. The
album model is not set in stone, but a creation of the technologies and
limitations available in the mid-century: how much you could fit on any one side
of a vinyl slab, the attendant size of the product and need to create art or
design works of that size, and so forth. As much as vinyl fetishists kicked
against the compact disc dominance of the last two decades, CDs at least fit a
familiar listening model still. The rise of this new model, which like every
other musical medium will get increasingly cheaper and with wider access for
both purchasing and actual creation of music, is a much different kettle of
fish. Uniform ‘releases’ may become increasingly irrelevant when two different
consumers judge the same batch of songs from an artist and select only those
which please them, and therefore only keep those. If one person’s Album X
is different from another’s, and both are notably different [in amounts of
songs, running order, whatever] from ‘the Album X sessions’ database all
tracks were downloaded from, the potential implications for both albums as an
artifact and the methods in which recorded music collections are criticized will
play out for years to come.

This said, predicting the future down to the last crossed t is never
possible. This may all be too utopian on the one hand, too radical on the other,
for instant acceptance on many levels. But the potential is strong for things to
turn out this way, very strong indeed. Hail, then, the discrete music album,
something which is soon to no longer be the one way. Inasmuch as this is a
celebration of excellent records from the past ten years, this is also an
acknowledgement that ten years from now we will be all quite surprised at how we
talk about music. It won’t quite be like the way I’ll be doing it here
anymore.

***

SO WHY 136?

When I suggested this nutty thing – and when Tom agreed with alacrity! – I
took some time one afternoon and looked through my collection. I had a basic
rule of thumb – whatever it was that I would choose had to be something I owned
and enjoyed. I am not interested in what I’m supposed to like, but in
what I actually like.

So that should serve as an initial warning right there – like Tom is doing
with his list, I pretend no universalist approach. If your favorite album of the
decade was indeed Nevermind, say, more power to ya – it’s nowhere on my
own list, though I don’t mind it as a record. The opinions expressed herein are
mine unto eternity, but should you disagree, my general reaction is, "That’s
cool." That’s why your list is different from mine. ;-) If you don’t see
something you love on here, the reasons are:

I haven’t heard it. And if I haven’t heard it and you are convinced I
must hear it this second, then drop me a mail and life is happy. And
indeed, any and all feedback is welcome and loved – ned@kuci.org
is where to write.

I have heard it. When you drop me this putative mail as above and I
tell you that I would rather jump off of cliffs onto piles of offal rather
than have to encounter anything from Crash or Jagged Little Pill
or Bakesale again, then you’ll know.

I have heard it and I enjoy it enough, but not to the point of actually
ranking it anywhere. Random examples – Nevermind, Ten (about
half of it), anything by Godspeed you Black Emperor!, anything the Fall have
released this decade, etc.

And while on the subject of bias, you’ll note a lot of UK bands who employ
stylists on my list and a large absence of US bands who are rough and rootsy.
Not only do I make no apologies, I am willing to through the switch on whatever
cosmic control ensures that bands like Phish, the Black Crowes and Rage Against
the Machine, to name three on a very long list, disappear and are forgotten
forever.

Anyway, I went through my collection and noted down album names as I went,
things that made me go, "Hell yeah, this was great." My limitations – had
to have been released in the 1990s as a discrete album, while compilations I
allowed only if all tracks on it were also released in the 1990s. Aside from
that, anything went.

When I was done, I counted up what I had, and realized there were 136 albums
on the list. For a second I thought about maybe paring this down to 100, but
then concluded, "To hell with it. That’s as much an artificial distinction as
anything, so who the heck cares? 136 it is!" After going through and creating a
general order of things, I then realized that I had left some albums out that I
shouldn’t’ve on my first time through. But since I had already written out the
order of albums and wasn’t about to do that again – I’m not that
persnickety, I hope! – I happily reserve the right to plug into the list from
time to time things which I left out first time through. Thus, ‘136 or so’ –
we’ll see if it stays around there!

Like Tom’s list, mine starts at the bottom and works its way along. If you’ve
read through all this, you don’t need to read through any more! Onward into the
list!